THEME and MOTIVATION

The languages from the Balto-Slavic group play an important role due to their diverse cultural heritage
and widespread use — with over 400 million speakers. The recent political and economic developments in
Central and Eastern Europe have brought Balto-Slavic societies and their languages into focus in terms
of rapid technological advancement and rapidly expanding consumer markets.

This Workshop addresses Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the Balto-Slavic languages.
The NLP tasks in urgent need of attention include, but are not limited to:

morphological analysis and generation,

morpho-syntactic tagging and parsing,

semantic parsing,

lexical semantics,

named-entity recognition,

co-reference resolution,

information extraction,

sentiment analysis,

question answering,

information retrieval,

text summarization,

machine translation.

Research on theoretical and applied topics in the context of many
Balto-Slavic languages is still in its early stages. The
linguistic phenomena specific to Balto-Slavic languages —
such as rich morphological inflection and free word order —
make the construction of NLP tools for these languages a
challenging and intriguing task.

The goal of this Workshop is to bring together academic researchers and industry practitioners working on
NLP for Balto-Slavic languages. In particular, the Workshop will serve as an instrument to further stimulate
the research on NLP techniques for Balto-Slavic languages, and to foster the creation of tools for these languages.
The Workshop will provide an forum for exchanging ideas and experience, discussing difficult-to-tackle problems
in this field of research, and making the available resources more widely-known. One fascinating aspect of this
sub-family of languages is the striking structural similarity, as well as an easily recognizable core vocabulary
and inflectional inventory spanning the entire group of languages — despite a lack of mutual intelligibility —
which creates a special environment in which researchers can fully appreciate the shared problems and solutions
and communicate naturally.

This Workshop continues the proud tradition established by the
previous BSNLP Workshops:

SUBMISSION

We accept two types of submissions: (a) full papers and (b) short papers. We accept only electronic submissions via the submission page.

Long papers should describe original unpublished work and should indicate the state of completion of
the reported results. Short papers should describe work in progress, small focused contributions
and/or interactive software demonstrations.

Overlap with previously published work should be clearly mentioned. The authors should indicate along
with their submission if the paper has been submitted elsewhere, e.g., for the main conference. In
particular, in case the paper is rejected by the main conference, it should be indicated in the submission.

All submissions, both long and short papers, will be judged on correctness, novelty, technical strength,
clarity of presentation, usability, and significance/relevance to the Workshop. Submissions will be
reviewed by at least three members of the Program Committee.

The reviewing will be blind. Therefore, the paper should not include the authors' names and affiliations.
Self ­citations and other references that reveal the authors' identities should be avoided.

In particular, submissions describing systems, resources, or solutions that are made available to the
wider public would be strongly encouraged, as this would help to promote computational linguistics
applications for Balto­Slavic languages.

Long paper submissions should follow the two-column format of RANLP 2015 proceedings not exceeding eight (8)
pages of content plus two (2) additional pages for references. Short paper submissions should follow the same
format, and should not exceed five (5) pages for content plus two (2) additional pages for references.
Submissions must conform to the official style guidelines of RANLP 2015, which are contained in the style files,
and must be in PDF. Camera-ready versions of accepted papers must be provided in LaTeX.

OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

The official language of the workshop is English.

PUBLICATION

The papers accepted for BSNLP 2015 will be published in BSNLP Workshop Proceedings.

After the Workshop, we intend to make a selection of the best papers based on this year's and
previous years' Workshops, and to publish extended versions of these papers in a dedicated
volume on Balto­-Slavic NLP, as a book or as a special journal issue. We are currently in
the process of negotiating with reputable publishers.